4 Ways Bad Hosting can Affect the SEO of Your Website

Websites are essential for today’s business. Whether you own a startup, a medium-sized company, or an enterprise, it is vital that your brand be discoverable on the internet. If you fail to launch a website that is properly search engine optimized, you risk losing hundreds, potentially thousands of customers. However, designing and developing a website is easier said and done.

While the design and development aspect of your website will be taken care of someone else, you’ll need to pay attention to its hosting. Whether you decide to go with a distributed, private, or VPS hosting plan, it is imperative that you understand the advantages and disadvantages of them all. Another factor that you’ll need to carefully analyze is the effect that bad web hosting can have on your website’s SEO.

Though it is true that SEO is an entire world of its own, it is interconnected with everything you do from marketing to web hosting. So, without wasting any more time, let’s dive into the topic of how hosting can influence the SEO of your website.

1. Frequent Server Downtimes Will Take Your Website Down

The first test of the effectiveness and efficiency of your website is its downtime. If the website you’ve spent days on developing suffers from frequent downtimes, you will be labeled as a non-reliable website. Downtime is essential because it doesn’t just speak volumes about your website’s performance, but also brings down the SEO and your search engine rankings.

Even if your website is down for a couple of minutes, it won’t show up on search engines in that particular time frame. And if someone happens to type in a query of content that’s available on your website, it will bring down your website’s SEO. Additionally, it will increase your site’s bounce rate and this, as a result, will impact your website’s authority.

Experts recommend that you avoid downtime as much as possible and try to get a cheap VPS hosting plan that gets you 99.9% uptime.

2. Slower Pages Will Drown Out

Another way to test the effectiveness of your web host is through the load time of the website. Even if your website has excellent, informative content to offer the visitors, it will all be useless if it takes too much time to load because this will count as a lack of performance.

While it may seem like too short a time, experts recommend that your website shouldn’t take more than two seconds to load. If it does take longer, then your visitors are likelier to switch to another option. Moreover, when your website takes longer to load, it will have a higher bounce rate and this, in turn, will negatively impact your SEO efforts.

The best hosting company or plan will help you reduce your website’s load time with latest technologies, and this will mean that you get a higher number of visitors.

3. Connection Failures Will Destroy Your Reputation

Imagine this, a visitor clicks on your website link or address and is greeted with an ‘Internal Server Error,’ doesn’t sound too good right? If this message is being displayed, then it means that the database connection cannot be accessed. Most of the time, this error will occur when too many users are on the website or trying to access it.
But the reason why this happens is that your website’s host wasn’t able to deal with the traffic. It doesn’t matter if you experienced a hike because your article on social media went viral or because you’re selling something everyone wants because connection failure will mean low traffic.

As a result of not being able to access your website, your earlier interested visitor will leave and probably not look back because he thinks you don’t have the potential to provide him with what he needs.

4. Using the Wrong TLD Will Bring Down Your SEO

Finally, as a visitor to any XYZ website, you will always assume that every website ends with a .com TLD. Though you understand that this isn’t always the case, you need to be cautious when naming your own website. For instance, a few years ago, when .com domains were practically finished, people started to look up to the .co domain.
Though the .co domain is the Colombian top-level domain, it doesn’t guarantee your website’s success. If you’re lucky enough to have a .com platform, don’t make the mistake of taking something else just because it has been hyped.

However, if you don’t have a website yet, think carefully about the name and domain you’re going to choose. If you have selected a name that reflects your services and is available on the domain, call yourself lucky and jump at the opportunity. If not, look for another domain that suits the sort of services you provide.

Wrapping Up

Both SEO and web hosting are essential for the success of your website, and the two have a pretty close connection as well. If you don’t think about it carefully and end up choosing a bad web host for your website, it can cost you visitors, revenue, and your search engine ratings as well.

On the other hand, if you’re careful in choosing the web host, you can not only invite visitors to it and increase your rankings but can also go up with revenue. So, make the best decision and remember to choose a host that can provide you with all the resources you need.

Lucy Orloski, Content Community Manager in SEOHeights, a Canada based digital marketing company, has worked in a number of capacities in marketing since 2008. She provides consultancy for increasing traffic through search engines, social media, email marketing and improving the site and page conversion rates to increase sales using existing visitor traffic. If you want to increase traffic, sales or want branding of your business then contact me